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Revive Your Sounds by Using MCharacter Plugin

December 1, 2017

Shaping Sound

Over the time, as music production techniques progressed, we were introduced to many creative ways to shape the sound. Some of them are offering truly outstanding results in terms of sound morphing and resynthesizing. The ability to alter the original sound source to something completely different is a base idea of these effects. One of them that really stands out is MCharacter by Melda Productions. It possesses the ability to redesign instruments, change its harmonic structure, change a vocalist tone or to work as a frequency following EQ.

Fixing the Harmonics

Musical instruments have a distinctive character defined by harmonics and formats. While formants are pretty much static in the spectrum and you can change them directly with equalizer, harmonics follow the pitch. For example, we have a vocal track where the singer produces a strong 5th harmonic which makes the sound “squeaky“. Using the traditional eq you will not fix this issue since it can dump only a specific frequency range, while the harmonic frequencies changes with every note the vocalist sings. By using the Mcharacter plugin you can specifically dump the 5th harmonic of the voice. You can also damp the piano with over pronounced 7th harmonic or even boost the bass sound that has a week fundamental tone.

In the next tutorial, I will guide you thru few practical examples by using MCharacter plugin on different instruments.

Let’s start

Let’s place a new instance of MCharacter plugin on the guitar track within SoundBridge. So, a very creative way to use this effect on the guitar is to simulate the feedback tone by shifting certain harmonics in the “Levels“ section. Moreover, the level graph contains the level of the harmonics. The plugin first detects the pitch of the sound, let’s say 100hz. We can then adjust the gain for the each harmonic, which we will achieve by automation of the selected harmonics. Lets first hear how it sound unprocessed and then processed with Mcharacter plugin together with automated harmonics.

In the next example, we have a drum loop that could use some more sub frequencies in the lower range of the frequency spectrum. Therefore, we will fix that by boosting the first and second harmonic levels by using the Mcharacter plugin. So, let’s hear the difference.

For the last example, we have an electric piano sequence and will show you how can you completely resynthesize the original sound by entering the “ Synthesis “ section and making a downward curve. I will boost some of the fundamental frequencies as well in order to achieve the full effect. Let’s again hear how it sounds before and after being processed with Mcharacter plugin.